Seagate is First to Ship More Than One Million Hard Drives with Shingled Magnetic Recording

Seagate has announced a new record it's pretty proud of, as it has shipped more than one million hard drives that use shingled magnetic recording (SMR). SMR alters the way data is stored by overlapping the tracks (like shingles on a roof) in order to both improve aerial density and increase track density. The amount of a data on a single disk is increased, as is the overall storage capacity, thanks to the SMR technology. According to Seagate's chief technology officer Mark Re, the nearly seven billion people on Earth are creating 2.7 zettabytes of data a year, and even approaching the limits of what can be stored on a conventional HDD. SMR allows for up to 1.25TB improvents per disk, which means 5TB and larger HDDs are certainly within the realm of possibility. It'd also mean more reliable drives since fewer disks and heads are necessary to create large capacity drives.